Satire

There have been rumors spreading around campus recently that some of the university’s current residence halls are projected to be remodeled for the future. There has been talk through the grapevine of building new halls, creating additions or renovations to current ones and switching first year res-halls to sophomore housing.

I wanted to get to the bottom of these rumors and figure out what was going on, so I decided to reach out to the mastermind behind this operation from the Office of Residential Life (ORL), Steve Williams. Steve is the Executive Director Area Developer of Residential Living Remodeling Operations Supervisor (EDADRLROS). I visited his closet-like office and we set a meeting to discuss the upcoming changes afterwards on Zoom.

To summarize the short meeting, which was roughly 3 hours, Williams and his team came up with the following plans:
1. Turning Celentano into a first year hall – Celentano Hall, which is currently an upperclassman building, would be renovated to become a first-year only hall. Instead of each suite having its own bathroom, each floor would have one communal bathroom that would encourage community development.
2. Due to the limited functionality of the current elevators, Williams and his team propose knocking down Westside and building a new Westside exactly how it was before but adding escalators in the buildings instead of elevators. When I asked for any details on how that would work inside Westside, he repeated back to me the same plan several times and then went on to the next idea.
3. Combining Bixler and Gerber together called Gerbixwanik – in memory of Gerber Hall’s former name, Botwinik, Williams envisioned this Frankenstein’s Monster with an elaborate glass overpass connecting Gerber and Bixler together over the quad. This overpass would create a great space for students where they can study and give them an easier way to watch all the events that take place in the quad.
4. Reinstating Maxcy Hall as a new branch of the ORL as an orphanage.

Meeting with EDADRLROS Williams made me realize how beyond excited we should all be for the renovations the ORL is planning for the coming year. Williams and his team have projected these plans to start this year and to be completed by 2042.